The first rule of censorship conferences is… do not talk about censorship conferences. Ignoring that, I encourage you to tune in to Yale’s Global Censorship Conference – it is an awesome group of speakers and topics. You can catch the livestream here. For those of you willing to get up on Sunday morning, you can […]

I have a short article coming out in the Wake Forest Law Review Online, about the pursuit of perfection in cyberlaw. Here’s the introduction: Cyberlaw is plagued by the myth of perfection. Consider three examples: censorship, privacy, and intellectual property. In each, the rhetoric and pursuit of perfection has proved harmful, in ways this Essay […]

The Federal Trade Commission today released its “final report” on consumer data privacy, updating a preliminary staff report from 2010. (Here’s a PDF of all 112 pages). The word “final” should be taken with several metric tons of salt, however — there is nothing final about this report, by its own admission. The report does […]

I have a short op-ed on how technology provides both power and peril for journalists over at JURIST. Here’s the lede: Journalists have never been more empowered, or more threatened. Information technology offers journalists potent tools to gather, report and disseminate information — from satellite phones to pocket video cameras to social networks. Technological advances have […]

In Florida v. Jardines, the U.S. Supreme Court will determine whether the sniff of a trained narcotics dog at the front door of a person’s home constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. This is very exciting for privacy scholars because it presents two possible shifts in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. First, the court might further expand Justice […]

My new article, “Space Invaders: Intrusion in the Digital Age,” lays out the case against the Fair Information Practice principles (“FIPs”) and for continued reliance on tort to shape American privacy law. The FIPs were originally articulated and presented to Congress in the 1973 HEW Report. The European Union’s Data Protection Directive draws heavily on […]

Pakistan, which has long censored the Internet, has decided to upgrade its cybersieves. And, like all good bureaucracies, the government has put the initiative out for bid. According to the New York Times, Pakistan wants to spend $10 million on a system that can block up to 50 million URLs concurrently, with minimal effect on […]